Parliament

PARLIAMENT. - I. HISTORY. - The term parlamentum was used in the Middle Ages to indicate institutions that differed from one another, namely on the one hand the general assemblies of the people of the Italian communes, on the other hand magistracies, as happened in France, and finally the general and provincial "estates," the latter being meetings of the three privileged orders: clergy, feudal nobility, towns.

Some of these assemblies had their roots in a very remote age, such as the assembly of the Kingdom of Italy in the 11th-13th centuries, which was linked to the Carolingian one and, through it, to the one formed by dukes, gastalds, the King's fideles, and a part of the people: the exercitus of the Lombard Kingdom. In general, however, such assemblies were formed in the 13th-14th centuries, that is, toward the end of the age properly called feudal. It was membership in the privileged classes and bodies proper to the feudal age that determined who had the right to take part in the general assemblies and influenced the formation of the provincial ones. The latter seem to have come into being through the fusion of meetings that took place in the great territories, duchies or marches, for the safeguarding of the peace and to support the royal missi in the administration of justice — meetings formed by the maiores terrae — with other meetings that the duke or marquis held in order to have counsel from his vassals. When, in the 13th century, the dukes or marquises wished to take back into their own hands, with greater vigor, the power over their territories, these various provincial assemblies merged and took on a more distinct shape. One of their chief purposes was to defend the privileges of the "estates" against the abuses of the princes and their officials. Thus there were numerous assemblies in Europe called "estates," although this word more properly indicated the various orders of which the assembly was formed. So in France people spoke of "general estates" to indicate the general assembly of the Kingdom. The designation "provincial estates" was introduced by historians to indicate those that met in the great provinces of the Kingdom, such as the Dauphiné, Savoy, Normandy, etc. The documents speak only of états de Normandie, or de Savoye. The term parliament prevailed especially in England and Italy.

The normal organization of these parliaments was founded on the three "estates" already mentioned. The first of these was formed by ecclesiastics: these must already have been present in the assemblies of the Lombard Kingdom and continued to take part in the Carolingian ones and in later ones as great dignitaries of the Kingdom, in whose hands the election of the King frequently lay. As for the provincial assemblies, the clergy took part in them by reason of the ample jurisdictions they enjoyed and the extensive lands they possessed, as well as because of the eminent position they held in the province. The ecclesiastical "estate" or "branch" was constituted in the provincial assemblies by bishops, by Chapters, by abbeys and by monasteries. The former took part, like the abbots, in person; the others sent procurators.

In the "estate" of the feudatories or barons, as they were called in Sicily, several categories of different origin were sometimes distinguished. An essential requirement was that of depending directly on the prince. Not infrequently the right to take part belonged not to a single person but to a feudal house, and the internal rules of the house established who was to take part in the parliament on its behalf and how the turns among those entitled were determined. If several persons took part, they had a single vote. As for the towns, their right to take part in the assembly depended either on a custom established in the first formation of the parliament, or on a particular privilege of the prince. Direct dependence on the latter was likewise an essential condition for the towns: in the Kingdom of Sicily this was said to be having the status of "royal domain," and for this reason the branch of the towns or "universities" was called the royal domain branch. The towns were represented in parliament by envoys of their own who rarely had full mandate; most of the time they had to report back and obtain the assent of the commune's Council for the proposed resolutions. The constitution of the parliament with three "estates" is the normal one; it must be observed, however, that in their origins the assembly was composed only of ecclesiastics and feudatories; the towns were added subsequently; in the assembly of the Kingdom of Italy this seems to have happened around 1130. Later this also happened in the Sicilian Parliament and even later in the English Parliament (1265). In the 16th century the Parliament of the Marches was reduced to an assembly of representatives of communes, because ecclesiastics and feudatories no longer took part in it.

As for the manner of meeting, it is observed that in Sicily, originally, the three "estates" or "branches" gathered together, but later, through the influence of Spanish customs, each sat separately. In the English Parliament the Upper House was constituted by the clergy and the barons, while the other included the country nobility and the representatives of the communes.

As for parliamentary competence, it is defined by fixed rules only in a later era. For a long time, in many parliaments, among them the English one, a great part of the sittings was occupied by the discussion and decision of judicial matters: a competence that had been handed down to them from the older assemblies, to which processes of great importance were referred and which, moreover, decided the disputes arising among their own members. Subsequently this competence was reduced to extraordinary cases, and the principal object of parliamentary debates was financial burdens. This part of their competence was of the greatest importance for the development of the parliament's powers, because the parliament took advantage of the prince's requests to obtain, in exchange, reforms in legislation, in administration, or other measures. This gave rise to the formation of the conception of the relations between "estates" and prince as a relationship of a contractual character. The granting of such subsidies furthermore gave the "estates" the means to check the prince's officials in order to see whether the money granted had been spent in the agreed manner, and this opened the way to a control over public administration.

Another important function was the legislative one, which was an original power of the general assemblies, while as regards the provincial parliaments it received its recognition in a decision of the Council of the Empire of 1231, according to which the princes could not issue new constitutions or nova iura without the consent of the maiores et meliores terrae. The parliaments then had a special competence for military measures.

As for the functioning of these assemblies, there was great variety, and it depended on the authority that the parliament had acquired. In the territories and periods in which it had a broad share in public affairs and also influenced foreign policy, as happened with the Piedmontese Parliaments in the 15th and 16th centuries and with the Friulian Parliament before the fall of the government of the Patriarch of Aquileia, parliamentary sittings were very frequent and the council, the parliament's permanent organ, met without interruption. The Sicilian Parliament, by contrast, is seen to meet, during the Spanish domination, as a rule every three years.

In no part of Europe did the parliament assume so independent a position vis-à-vis the sovereign as happened in England after the revolution of 1688 that drove King James II from the throne. From that time the English House of Commons began that evolution which led it, by successive stages, to be the model of all the others. Of such an evolution there is no example on the Continent. Instead, in some countries, and particularly in Germany, the "estates" set themselves before the prince as a power equivalent to him, so that a true dualism arose within the principality. This did not happen in the Italian parliaments, which instead progressively declined in the 16th-18th centuries, owing to the absolutist aims of the princes, who looked with distrust upon these bodies that limited their power especially in the financial sphere: the same tendencies for which the kings of France did not convoke the Estates General from 1614 onward, until the revolutionary wave of 1789 forced them to convoke them again. At the end of the 18th century there still existed in Italy: the Sicilian parliament, the "stamenti" or estates of Sardinia, the parliament of the Marches and that of Friuli. All were reduced to vain shadows and represented a society dominated by privilege that was soon to disappear. On the other hand, when the sovereigns, dispossessed of their states by Napoleon, succeeded in recovering them, they felt no desire to re-establish those old parliaments, wishing to give full development to absolutism.

Only the Sicilian parliament had a brief, interesting history in the period 1812-15. It was reorganized in 1812, taking the English parliament as its model; there were therefore created a House of Peers and a House of Commons. The experiment did not succeed, whether because of the inexperience of the parliamentarians, or because of the difficulty of making foreign institutions take root in Sicilian soil, or, above all, because of the hostility of King Ferdinand III, who, on 14 May 1815, dissolved the parliament and never convoked it again.

Pier Silverio Leicht

II. IN MODERN STATES

Parliament is the name by which legislative assemblies are generally designated (cf. Italian Constitution, part 2, title I), which are for the most part elected by all citizens possessing the right to vote (v.) in political elections.

In States with a bicameral parliament, the expression itself is not infrequently used only to indicate the elective Chamber, when the other is not elective; whereas in England it carries a broader and more specific meaning, embracing all three legislative bodies (namely: the king, the Houses of Lords and Commons), in the United States and in those of Latin America, the legislative assemblies are usually collectively designated rather by the expression Congress.

1. Bicameralism

In the great majority of contemporary States the parliament is bicameral, that is, constituted by two different Chambers (Chamber of Deputies and Senate of the Republic in Italy, National Assembly and Council of the Republic in France, House of Representatives and Senate in North America, etc.). Besides certain small States (Luxembourg, Monaco, San Marino, etc.), indeed, today only Turkey, Spain and certain European States satellites of the USSR have a unicameral parliament.

Bicameralism arose, however, in a wholly empirical manner, in England, in the first half of the 14th century, when the originally single parliament split into two distinct colleges: one comprising the high feudal lords, lay and ecclesiastical (the so-called temporal and spiritual lords, convoked individually) and the other the representatives of the boroughs and counties (burgesses and knights), designated by the respective communities. Instead, during the 19th century, almost all European Constitutions adopted it with deliberate intent, both, at first, in order to continue to benefit from the centuries-old experience of government of the nobility, gathering its exponents in an upper Chamber (Chamber of Magnates in Hungary, Chamber of Lords in Prussia, etc.), and, after the North American example (1787), in order to allow direct participation in legislative work to the member-States of the various federal States, when these were constituted (Switzerland 1848, Germany 1871, etc.), placing alongside a first Chamber, composed of representatives elected in proportion to the population of each of the member-States, a second Chamber formed, on the basis of the principle of their legal equality, by an equal number of representatives for each of them. In the subsequent constitutions of unitary States, the bicameral system ended up being adopted for reasons of political expediency, brought to light by recent constitutional events, such as the possibility of making use in the second Chamber of elements excluded from entering the first, etc.

An attempt was therefore generally made to give a different structure to the two assemblies. But, once the method of life appointment of the members of the second Chamber by the head of State had disappeared (as happened, for example, for the Italian statutory Senate), and the so-called mixed system had shown itself to be hardly convenient (in which appointment, election, heredity, and ex-officio membership all together contributed to constituting it: for example, the Japanese Chamber of Peers until 1945), it was preferred to form the second Chamber by an elective procedure, albeit different in its modalities from that adopted for the first: in regard, for example, to the number of members and the age of voters and of those eligible, to the duration of the mandate, to the total or partial renewal of the assembly, to the extent and nature of the electoral constituencies, etc.

However, now in Italy, the difference in composition of the two assemblies appears quite limited (all the more so since the electoral laws have largely blunted the rigid affirmation of art. 57 of the Constitution that "the Senate of the Republic is elected on a regional basis"). In any case: the Chamber is more numerous than the Senate; the voters of the former must be 21 years old and those elected 25, while for the latter the corresponding ages are raised to 25 and 40; the duration of the mandate is respectively 5 and 6 years; the electoral constituencies of the former are multi-member and a system of proportional representation has been adopted with the utilization of remainders in a single national list (Consolidated Text of 5 Feb. 1948), for the latter single-member constituencies have been configured and in order to immediately fill the single seat, 65% of the valid votes cast in the individual constituency is required, then distributing the remaining seats (which are, as a rule, the great majority) likewise with a system of proportional representation, operating, however, only within the regional ambit (law of 6 Feb. 1948).

As for their respective attributions, if classical bicameralism imposed a full parity between the two assemblies, often in practice (especially if one of them was not elective, as is now the case, for example, of statutory Italy) a noticeable diversity came to be outlined in their respective weight with regard to political life (a diversity not infrequently, moreover, formally recognized also by law: v., for example, in England, the Parliament acts of 1911 and 1949 in favor of the House of Commons). In Italy, moreover, in 1947 the full parity of attributions between the two assemblies was reaffirmed.

2. Structure and internal functioning of the Chambers

The Chambers are, juridically, collegial and constitutional organs of the State, lacking a distinct legal personality of their own (with the sole exception of England), but with full independence, organizational and functional (extended also into the financial sphere), and endowed with particular parliamentary prerogatives for the protection of their members (irresponsibility for votes and opinions expressed during sittings; the necessity of an authorization to proceed from the respective assemblies in order to be able to proceed to their arrest or their bringing to trial; etc.).

Each Chamber then regulates its own internal organization with specific parliamentary rules and avails itself of its own staff of officials, headed by a secretary general (Clerk in the Anglo-Saxon Chambers). Each elects "Presidency Offices" (Italian Const., art. 63), formed by a president (speaker in the Anglo-Saxon Chambers) and by various vice-presidents, quaestors and secretaries. Often, moreover, they are subdivided into multiple "parliamentary groups" corresponding, for the most part, to the different political parties, which assume notable importance in the daily unfolding of parliamentary life (formation on a proportional basis of all the committees elected by the assemblies; Italian Const., arts. 72 and 82; etc.).

In adherence to the opinions dominant in the electorate, a frequent renewal is required for the representative Chambers: the legislatures (that is, the aforementioned periods of life of the assemblies) are, therefore, always brief (today, in Italy, 6 years for the Senate and 5 for the Chamber). Moreover, the head of State may dissolve the Chambers in advance, when he deems it opportune (in Italy, however, according to art. 88 of the Constitution, only after having heard their presidents and not during the last 6 months of his office). The sessions, instead, constitute the continuous periods of parliamentary work: and they are ordinary when the convocation of the assemblies is automatically fixed at determined times of the year (in Italy, according to art. 62 of the Constitution, "the Chambers meet by right on the first non-holiday day of Feb. and of Oct."); extraordinary, if the session is exceptionally convened by the head of State, or by their president, or by a determined number of members (in Italy two-thirds).

The sittings of the Chambers are normally public, and citizens may address petitions to them (v. PETIZIONE), but only in writing; their deliberations, moreover, are valid only if the prescribed quorum of members is present (in Italy, an absolute majority); special disciplinary powers belong to the president for directing the discussions, and specific rules of procedure allow, among other things, for reducing within due limits any obstructionism on the part of the dissenting minority. But the orderly conduct of the Chambers' business is achieved, in general, even more than by legal rules, through the conscientious observance of those rules of constitutional propriety which constitute the so-called parliamentary etiquette (so rigidly respected, for example, in the British P.).

3. Functions of the P

They are of a legislative nature; but other functions are usually conferred upon it as well, of a materially executive nature and, at times, even judicial (v. POTERI PUBBLICI).

Whereas in contemporary monarchies the formal law is a complex act resulting from the concordant will of the king (the so-called sanction) and of the Chambers, in republican governments, on the other hand, it presents itself as the will of the Chambers alone. The president of the Republic has, in fact, only a suspensive veto, being able to return to the Chambers for a new vote the law that has reached him for promulgation (which he carries out in the exercise of a purely executive function); but if the Chambers renew their vote (by simple majority, under art. 74 of the Italian Constitution; by a two-thirds majority under the North American Constitution; etc.), the entry into force of the law cannot, as a rule, be delayed.

The examination and approval of bills (introduced by parliament, the government, the people, etc.) within the individual Chambers may take place according to quite different systems; but the most widespread (Italian Constitution, art. 72) is today that of the so-called legislative Commissions, each competent for a different subject matter, which carry out all the necessary preparatory work, subsequently bringing the bill before the assembly together with a report of their own, sometimes combined with another report by the minority. For legislative measures of lesser importance the Italian Constitution sometimes settles for simple approval by the Commission, then convened in deliberative session, so as to lighten somewhat the assembly's growing burden of legislative work.

Political control is exercised in itself through questions, interpellations and parliamentary inquiries, culminating in the vote on motions which, if they are motions of no confidence, bring about the resignation of the minister concerned or (as the case may be) of the entire Cabinet: and when such a step is repeated with thoughtless arbitrariness by the Chambers, it gives rise to a harmful and irresponsible overbearing power, which takes the name of parliamentarism. In presidential forms of government (such as that of the United States), where the ministers are politically responsible only to the president and not to the Congress, it has therefore seemed necessary to assign in detail to the second Chamber certain specific functions of control over the conduct of the head of State (for example: the North American Senate must approve, by a two-thirds majority, the treaties concluded by the president, the appointments he makes of the highest officials, etc.).

Financial control is exercised through the vote on the budget law which, with its rigid division into "chapters" of the expenditure permitted for each Ministry, comes to constitute, in this regard, a binding criterion for the use of public money, and through the continuous verification of the full implementation of the said law, relying, as a rule, on special "control bodies" placed alongside the active executive ones (for example, in Italy, availing itself of the Court of Accounts).

More limited, on the other hand, are now, almost everywhere, the functions of a judicial nature still attributed to the P. They had, in fact, been conferred in the nineteenth century on the continental European Chambers with a certain liberality, in imitation of what happened in England where, even today, the House of Lords functions, in certain cases, as a supreme court of appeal (on the basis of the so-called impeachment procedure, ministers, in criminal matters, are accused by the Commons and judged by the Lords). But, subsequently, the aforementioned functions have for the most part been devolved to special judicial bodies.

Thus, for example, in Italy (setting aside the authorizations to proceed, granted with regard to its own members), the P. exercises functions of this nature only when, in joint session of the two assemblies, it refers to the judgment of the Constitutional Court, by an absolute majority of its members, the president of the Republic, and by a relative majority, the president of the Council and the ministers (Italian Constitution, art. 96) for crimes committed in the exercise of their functions.

Paolo Biscaretti di Ruffa